ENCORE: So, David Galenson, what kind of genius or innovator are you?

GALENSON: I’m very clearly experimental. I’m a very inductive person. I’ve kind of known it vaguely all my life.

I’m in a discipline that’s dominated by conceptual people. The most prestigious economists are overwhelmingly conceptual. These guys get ahead faster than people like me. They write these really extraordinary dissertations that in some cases win Nobel prizes. They get promoted very quickly and they kind of walk on water. A lot of them are as good at 25 as they will ever be. A lot of them are better at 25 than they will ever be again.

My projects take much longer than theirs. For my dissertation on white servitude in colonial America, I started with about 20,000 contracts of indentured servants who traveled from England to America in the 17th and 18th centuries. I collected data for a year. My colleagues thought that was bizarre. They might collect data for a day or two.

ENCORE: Even though there are these two poles of genius the conceptualizers still win out.

GALENSON: They win out in several senses. A former student and I did a study of Nobel Laureates in economics. Only five or six have been experimental and there are about 50 or 60 who were conceptual. If you compare a really important experimental and a really important conceptual economist, the conceptual ones tend to win out because they get their rewards very early. If you write a brilliant dissertation you can get promoted very quickly. Even if you never do anything important again, you’re famous throughout your career. If you’re experimental, your work may not become known until you’re in your 50s or 60s.

The people who are most visible early in the life of any cohort are the conceptual ones because they make these dramatic discoveries early in their lives. The ones who emerge later as the cohort ages are the experimental ones. There are some anomalies but by and large the really important conceptual innovations come when you’re young. By and large the really important experimental ones come when you’re old. I could show you a few exceptions, but very few.

The good news was you could have a successful career. The bad news was you probably never were going to be as successful as these conceptual people.

ENCORE: The experimenters don’t have as many years to enjoy their success.

GALENSON: Yes. But that is unduly negative. The real issue for each of us is not are other people more successful, but rather can we be successful in what we want to do?

ENCORE: You’re saying you don’t have a choice of whether you’re a conceptualizer or an experimentalist?

GALENSON: You simply don’t have a choice. I could have chosen to be a conceptual economist but I would have been a terrible one.

I believe that people think essentially, consistently in one way. If you’re conceptual in your work are you conceptual in the way you approach other problems? I think the answer is yes because you only have one brain and you approach problems in a certain way. These are not issues of choice. It’s your personality.

ENCORE: How did you first discover this pattern?

GALENSON: I’ve bought art almost my whole life — not terribly expensive art. There’s a big art fair in Chicago every spring with hundreds of dealers from all over the world. In the spring of 1977 I was going to buy a painting there by a conceptual artist named Sol LeWitt. I got into discussions with the dealer and a friend of mine who works for the artist about whether the price was right. My friend said, “It’s over priced. We’re selling his new work for much less than that.” I said, “Yes but this looks like it’s 10 or 15 years old.” She said, “That doesn’t matter.”

The amount of money wasn’t very great. But throughout my career I had studied relationships in which the value of somebody’s work was expressed as a function of that person’s age. Indentured servants. Slaves in colonial America. Immigrants in the 19th century. So I thought, “This is kind of interesting. I can see whether artists’ work gets more valuable over the course of their career.” In general, we tend to think that people’s work does go up in value over their career. But for years and years I’d gone to galleries and museums and dealers and heard, “Oh here’s a wonderful early example of this guy’s work.” If people’s work gets better over the course of their career you shouldn’t be talking about wonderful early examples.

We got the auction data for the preceding 30 years for 25 American artists and put the data into the computer and then found this very surprising result. For roughly half of the artists the later the work was done in their careers the more expensive it was at auction. For the other half, the earlier the work was done in their careers, the more valuable it was at auction. That was just a complete puzzle.

This is the kind of puzzle that I’ve always worked on. You look for these patterns and then you say, What produces that pattern? That’s the fun part, learning about the people and trying to figure out why.

We plotted the relationship between the age and the value of the work for each artist on one piece of paper. I put them on the floor of my office and looked at them in different configurations. One of the things I did was to arrange them chronologically in order of the artist’s date of birth. These were the abstract expressionists and then the next generation — Jackson Pollock, (Mark) Rothko and their colleagues and then Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and their contemporaries.

A very extraordinary thing happened. When I put these all on the floor of my office chronologically what you saw was that for the earlier artists, the value of their work all went up over the course of their careers. Whereas for the second half – the later artists – it went down, down, down. So now I had a more specific question to ask: why is it that the earlier artists got better as they got older, whereas the later artists got worse as they got older?

As I began to read about the individual artists, I discovered that there was this generational shift. The abstract expressionists, they were seekers, they were experimentalists. People like Pollock, Rothko, all of the abstract expressionists who become dominant in American art in the mid-50s had in common the attitude that they wanted to discover images in the process of making their paintings. They were self-proclaimed children of surrealism. They wanted to discovery what was going on in their own unconscious by the process of working.

They were followed by a group of younger artists, who liked the art but hated the rhetoric. guys said, “Let’s get rid of all this psychological mumbo jumbo. Let’s just make images, simple images, images that we can preconceive.” So (Jasper) Johns, (Robert) Rauschenberg, (Andy) Warhol, (Roy) Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, they all shared that one thing.

Stylistically the abstract expressionist had very little in common and stylistically the next generation had very little in common. But the first generation all wanted to completely avoid preconception in making art. The second generation all wanted completely to preconceive their images. So much so that some of them don’t make their own art. That was the contrast.

ENCORE: The conceptualizers wouldn’t have succeeded in the earlier school and the experimentalists wouldn’t have succeeded in the later school.

GALENSON: Yes, and it goes beyond that. The conceptual people are the ones who are sitting in a classroom or in a library and in the classic caricature of innovation, the light bulb goes on at that moment. This is the “Eureka!” moment that scientists write about very often. If you ask a theoretical economist, like a mathematician, they’ll say “I just saw the idea all at once.” In fact, you can’t see it all at once. When they write it down it might take ten or twenty pages. But they know in advance. All they have to do is write out the details. The execution is perfunctory to use the artists’ term.

There’s nothing preconceived about what I do or what other experimental scholars do. You’re looking. You’re trying to find out what the patterns are and then you’re trying to find out why they exist.

ENCORE: I can see why experimenters get better, but why do conceptualizers get worse?

GALENSON: There’s no law that you can’t make more than one innovation. Let’s say you’re a conceptual person and you made the most important artistic invention of the 20th century when you’re 25 years old. Your name is Pablo Picasso. Cubism was the language, not only of painting, but of sculpture, of movies, of architecture. Every time you see a skyscraper that’s a box, you’re looking back to cubism indirectly. Cubism was massively influential. It’s probably the greatest single artistic innovation of the 20th century.

Picasso makes a series of other innovations. “Guernica” was the result of a cataclysm that jolted him out of what he was doing. Picasso was making these café subjects and he was alternating that with these classical subjects. Then the fascists destroyed his town. Franco got German bombers to come in and destroy Guernica. Picasso was so outraged that he did something that he had never done in his career. Nobody had ever used cubism to deal with a public subject and now he did. And that was a substantial innovation but not nearly as important as inventing cubism in the first place.

Why do conceptual innovators become unproductive after their first idea? The problem is a lot of them just tend to keep repeating the same thing. Every time they think about a problem they think about it in that same way and by definition the new thing can’t be innovation. So the key to multiple conceptualizations is to change subjects so radically that you can’t get stuck in a rut.

Robert Lucas, Jr. (winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in economics), Kenneth Arrow, Pablo Picasso — they made a series of innovations. But the later ones tend to be less important than the earlier ones. As you get older, you’re thinking becomes more circumscribed because you’ve learned more. It becomes narrower. It’s not a law, but it’s a tendency. Later innovation tends to be narrower in scope and therefore less important.

ENCORE: And for experimenters it’s the reverse?

GALENSON: If I lined up all fifty landscapes that Cezanne painted of the Mont Sainte-Victoire over a 30-year period, you’ll see there’s a very strong family resemblance but there’s a change. You keep studying the same things but you learn more about them. It is exactly the opposite of what the conceptual people do. The way that they can innovate is by doing something completely different whereas the experimental people stick to their guns.

I really loved it when I discovered that Cezanne lived in Paris for about ten years and then in the mid 1880’s he left Paris. He said he had to leave because this is the heyday of Neo Impressionism and all of these conceptual innovators and he said, “I just can’t compete with them. I know what I’m doing is right but I can’t prove it. And so I just have to go somewhere where I can work by myself until I can show them the results because it’s a completely different process of production.”

Cezanne was so far outside the main stream that no young people responded to his art during his lifetime. He had an enormous impact but he died thinking that he had no influence. Because he was doing something that was so out of step with his discipline.

I use only one measure of success and it’s not contemporary success, it’s not price or anything else. It’s, do you change your discipline? The more you change it the more important you are. Things like the price of paintings, those reflect success but they are not success. Success really is influence. In every intellectual activity the relevant measure of success for me is simply innovation. Invention. It’s a new way of doing something that then diffuses and influences other people.

ENCORE: You’ve crunched the data in art and in poetry and in a number of other fields. Does the pattern hold in social innovation?

GALENSON: I can’t prove this but at this point I’m certain: it applies to all intellectual activity. The key question about any person is, Do you think inductively or deductively? In virtually every activity, there are both types of innovator, experimental and conceptual.

Let’s say you have a conceptual person with children and you have an experimental person working with children. The conceptual one would tend to be abstract and say, “I’m saving the future.” And the experimental one will say, “I work with little kids.” They might even say, “I work with little kids in Denver between the age of five and nine.” There’s a real forest and trees difference in the way experimental and conceptual people think about what they’re doing.

ENCORE: There’s a broad notion that boomers wanted to change the world in the sixties and now maybe they’ll actually do it in their sixties. Based on your work, it strikes me that maybe its people of the same generation, but different people, different types. Maybe it’s the moment for the experimenters now.

GALENSON: Revolutions are made by young people, young conceptual people. When those same people get old they realize why revolution is doomed to failure. They become more realistic. Revolution is not a realistic thing to do. It usually ends in disaster and older people are usually warning the young zealots that that’s the case.

The young revolutionaries of the 60s are probably not going to become the aging social entrepreneurs of the 21st century.

ENCORE: Who are going to more experimental?

GALENSON: Muhammad Yunus (winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize) started a new kind of bank. Anybody would have said a bank in Bangladesh is the worst thing in the world to do. A bank lending to poor people is even worse. This is as maverick as it gets. Muhammad Yunus just did it because it looked like the right thing to do.

Or Wilma Melville (2007 Purpose Prize winner). Here’s a retired gym teacher who has a trained search dog. She comes back from this searing experience in Oklahoma City. All of a sudden all of the things in her life came together. And these were things that she had never thought were connected. She said, “I could write a curriculum because I had been a teacher. I knew how to teach young men, fire fighters, because I’d raised four sons. I knew how to train dogs because I had. And all of a sudden I saw a thing I could do using all of those skills.” You see the opportunity and then you say, “Wow.”

Gene Jones (another 2007 Purpose Prize winner) was retired. He went to a seminar and they said, “Music can improve education.” He knew how to run companies. He knew he loved music. And he discovered that that could affect education. All of a sudden everything comes together and he could see how he could use it. It’s not that he’d been preparing for that. But it was as if all of his life he had been preparing for that moment.

The conceptual people know they’re going to be successful. They know they’ve solved a problem. They know it’s of interest to other people. The only question is how many other people will adopt it. Experimental people really don’t know. The end is so distant and they’re not sure there is one. They really don’t know if they’re going to be successful. They don’t know if it’s possible to be successful. You do what you’ve got to do.

ENCORE: Is one purpose of your project is revaluing or raising the value of this experimental kind of genius?

GALENSON: That’s what I’ve become more and more aware of. The word genius itself comes from a Greek root meaning to be born. There’s this preconception that real brilliance manifests itself young. This lesser thing called maybe ability or something like that, or knowledge that comes out when you’re old. Geniuses are young and wisdom comes with age – that’s dead wrong.

Every time we see a young person do something extraordinary, we say, “That’s a genius. Whereas every time we see an old person do something extraordinary we say, “Isn’t that remarkable?” Nobody had noticed how many of those old exceptions there are an how much they have in common.

Anyone who doesn’t call Cezanne a genius or Rembrandt a genius, I think they’re missing the boat.

ENCORE: Anything you’d like to add?

GALENSON: I was curious if Civic Ventures had considered creating an award for art. It wouldn’t be for a famous old artist. What they do with the art awards or the literature awards is they pin an award on a 70-year-old guy who wrote a great novel when he was 25. Do it the same way you do it for the Purpose Prize. Give it to an artist who has done the most since they turned 50, or 60.

Louise Bourgeois is a wonderful example. A 96-year-old woman who didn’t become known until after she was 70 years old. She was teaching school in Great Neck, New York when she was in her 50s. (Jackson) Pollock was dead already and she just kept going for another 50 years. She’s got a retrospective now with the Tate Modern which is the most important modern museum in the world. She’s now one of the greatest artists in the world. It’s exactly because she’s experimental. Her work got greater and greater, but because of sexism she was completely ignored earlier. If Civic Ventures were to establish an award like that she would get the first one.